Reading
is reading is reading, right? English professor Natalie Phillips decided
to put it to the test, by asking volunteers to get their brain scanned
while reading Jane Austen:

"Everyone told me to expect these really, really minute and subtle
effects," she said, "because everyone was going to be doing
the same thing, right? Reading Jane Austen. And they were just going
to be doing it in two different ways."

Phillips said she mainly expected to see differences in parts of the
brain that regulate attention because that was the main difference between
casual and focused reading.

But in a neuroscientific plot twist, Phillips said preliminary results
showed otherwise: "What's been taking us by surprise in our early
data analysis is how much the whole brain — global activations
across a number of different regions — seems to be transforming
and shifting between the pleasure and the close reading."

Phillips found that close reading activated unexpected areas: parts
of the brain that are involved in movement and touch. It was as though
readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they
analyzed it.